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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2016
like math and literacy, but also social
and emotional skills.
Seyfert pulled up the Learning Pro-
gression spreadsheet of one of her stu-
dents, a seventh grader. Grades from
kindergarten to eighth grade were de-
noted on the X axis, and various sub-
ject areas on the Y axis. Areas of com-
pleted study---sixth-grade math, for
example---were indicated by cells filled
in with green. Areas the student was
still working on---seventh-grade sci-
ence, for instance---were colored or-
ange. In English, he was working well
ahead of his expected grade level. Sey-
fert could click on each subject area to
get more precise information about his
progress.The e ect was rather like open-
ing an online report from a credit-card
company that can show expenditures
by category---Shopping,Travel---as well
as specific purchases. She could see how
many articles the student had read on
Newsela, a site that provides Associ-
ated Press articles edited for di erent
reading levels. She could click to see
the student's scores on the quizzes that
accompanied each article, and then go
into the article itself to read his anno-
tations and marginal notes.
Here and there a solitary orange cell
indicated an area that the student had
not yet mastered. A student might have
been sick the week that his fifth-grade
class consolidated its knowledge of frac-
tions and might not quite have grasped
the principle. "If I notice he is really
scoring low on a standard, I can go and
look at the cards that assess that stan-
dard and see where the breakdown is
happening," Seyfert explained.
At the same time, educators at Alt-
School are discussing whether children
really need to attain certain skills at par-
ticular stages of their educational devel-
opment, as the Common Core implies.
Seyfert thinks that it might be more
useful to think of learning not as linear
but as scrambled, like a torrent file on a
computer: "You can imagine all the things
you need to learn, and you could learn
it all out of order so long as you can zip
it up at the end, and you are good to go."
Like other AltSchool teachers, Sey-
fert was drawn to the startup because of
its ambition to make systemic change.
Two or three times a week, she told me,
she gives colleagues feedback about the
school's digital tools.The Learner Profile,
Stream app, and other tools are only
about a year old, and AltSchool's per-
sonalization still requires considerable
human intervention. Software is updated
every day. Carolyn Wilson, AltSchool's
director of education, told me, "We en-
courage sta members to express their
pain points, step up with their ideas, take
a risk, fail forward, and fail fast, because
we know we are going to iterate quickly.
Other schools tend to move in geologic
time." (Ventilla may question the util-
ity of foreign-language acquisition, but
fluency in the jargon of Silicon Valley---
English . ---is required at AltSchool.)
Ventilla told me that these tools were
central to a revised conception of what
a teacher might be: "We are really shift-
ing the role of an educator to someone
who is more of a data-enabled detec-
tive." He defined a traditional teacher as
an "artisanal lesson planner on one hand
and disciplinary babysitter on the other
hand." Educators are stakeholders in
AltSchool's eventual success: equity has
been o ered to all full-time teachers.
In Seyfert's classroom, I spoke with
Otto Craddock, the seventh grader
whose Learning Progression I had
glimpsed. He had been researching the
job that he held in the simulation: sec-
retary. His parents, an advertising con-
sultant and an executive at BlackRock,
had moved him from a well-regarded
private school. Gorse Je ries, his mother,
told me that he had seemed listless. Otto
said, "At my old school, they were, like,
'O.K., you want to do architecture?
Maybe in college you can do architec-
ture.' Here some people selected archi-
tecture, and we did a whole unit on ar-
chitecture, and we built models and
projects."
The previous day, Otto said, a guest
teacher had come in to lead several stu-
dents in a -D-modelling project, using
a Web site called Tinkercad. "We built
little models online---some people built
phone cases, or little towers, or yo-yos,"
Otto said. "I built a toilet, because I
thought it would be fun. It has lots of
di erent components---you have the
base, you have the seat, you have the
back." He clicked to the site and pulled
up his model. "I was looking around at
pictures of toilets online," he said. "I
think I want to make it a bit more shaped
for your back. I also want really sanitary
toilets. And I want to make it really
comfy. I'm quite bony, and I'm small,
and if they don't have a cushion they
hurt." Eventually, Otto said, he planned
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